A Great Hope
by emeraldeyes83
Summary: When the mallrats set sail for a new life at the end of Season 6, Trudy finally feels hope.


"My great hope is to laugh as much as I cry; to get my work done and try to love somebody and have the courage to accept the love in return." - Maya Angelou

...

When they sail away Trudy feels hope: the City has never felt like home to her. She is still reminded of being fourteen and pregnant, panic-stricken and scared, watching as her now-Tribe-members voted for her place in their family. Four, for. Five, against.

He had been against her from the beginning.

...

When they sail away Jack feels loss. He grew up there, walked the streets with his parents, played in the parks, brought comics from the little stand outside the Phoenix Mall and read them, spread out on the basement floor, whilst his father tinkered with the security cameras or fiddled with the electrics. He had gone there when they had died, too quickly for him to be evacuated. He had read comics for a long time and pretended that nothing had changed.

It was _his_ Mall, he had always felt like that. He had left a lot of times before, either through choice or capture, but this time it was so final, this time he knew he would never be going back.

...

She imagines desert islands and lush, green forests, a farm. Somewhere clean and safe and sustainable, somewhere to grow their own food. Chickens and horses and fields to run about in. She tells Brady stories of such things as they travel and of pirates and princesses and Peter Pan, mimicking the funny voices every where she can. Together they watch the water wash by, make up names for the fishes they see, find pictures in the clouds.

One day she catches him watching her, the smile they share is familiar and genuine. He knows some of the names that she doesn't and is better at making up the ones they _both_ don't. He makes her laugh.

His presence is always brief by her side and the pictures in the clouds are always circuit boards or telescopes or laptops or helicopters. They are physical things - technology - they run alongside her unicorns and Brady's fairies as though they know nothing of the boundaries of reality between them.

He tells _her_ than his mother used to read him Peter Pan when he was a child. It is not stammered as such, but his voice is low and uneven when he speaks. Everyone else is asleep and it is they who have drawn the night-watch on deck. They lean against the tip of the bow, eyes focused into the black water or the clear sky. There are no fish or clouds to distract them so he tells her about his mother, ignoring the taboo of the subject in order to justify listening to her as she tells Brady those stories from memory. He knows some other parts too, he grins shyly, parts about the lost-boys adventures and the _treacherous Captain Hook._

He tries to do the voice as he says it, but he isn't as well practiced as she is. Still she laughs, harder than she has in a long time, the sound as clear as a star in the dark.

...

It is more like _he_ had imagined it when they get there.

They trade one City for another, one rabble of kids for another, one home for another. They settle down in some disused warehouse space with no real amenities, but at least the opportunity to split up the spaces into bedrooms and common areas and vantage points enough to protect themselves. She told him once, not so long ago, that it felt like they were starting all over again, from the bottom. But this time it is, this time they really are.

The Mallrats are no one here. They are not the champions of the City, they do not hold power and reverence over the Tribes of children settled there. They are just another pack of rats, scrabbling for food, squabbling for power.

Jay and Amber and Ebony and Lex spend their time in determined, heated discussions with the local leaders. They give bits of information, like how the virus was released again, like how they defeated the Chosen and the Technos. Ram rolls his eyes at this, refusing to completely abolish his old Tribe; removes the 'T' from his forehead and trades in his lycra top for a black vest, but does not remove the uniform completely, keeps the combats and the boots, the car-belt-buckle.

Ram tells _him_ that they could get the power back on in this place, between them, as a team, his smile impish as he unrolls the plans and blueprints to this place that he has got from God-knows-where. _He_ can't resist. Can't pull back from the chance to do something, to be someone for once. The chance of power is intoxicating, using his brain and solving the problem become his main focus. He doesn't sleep much.

...

Cracks start to appear.

Perhaps things had never been as perfect as he had wanted to believe. They had never really been the same since Luke, since her betrayal. He doesn't like to think of it like that, doesn't like to think that his trust is shaky when it comes to her.

Ellie had once been the right choice for him, so spunky and clever and fierce and determined. Some of that had faded with The Chosen and a little more with The Technos. In this new place they try to make it work, try to hold on to each other even though he is working closely with Ram and she doesn't trust him, even when she starts up the paper again and is seen laughing with boys who take pictures and provide leads.

They hold on as long and as hard as they can.

...

Brady loves it there.

Her daughter doesn't see the broken windowpanes as dangerous, she just calls the splayed rainbows and patterns they cast on the ground _magic_.

Brady has no eye for barbed wire or splintered wood or rusting metal in the courtyard, just the fences they make for protection, the chicken run they make for food.

There are blisters on _her_ fingers from double-digging the ground, but only mud under Brady's finger nails as she plants the seeds and talks to them in the sun and in the rain, wishing them to grow.

It isn't what she had imagined, not quite, not yet, but the chickens lay eggs and the first promise of food starts to spring up in neat little rows. She isn't saving anyone with her vegetable patch, she isn't changing the world or challenging the hierarchy or being someone but she is doing something for the first time in a long time: she is living.

Brady doesn't remember the stink of bleach or know about the sting of it in the back of _her_ throat from scrubbing the mold from the walls and the dirt from the floor. It smells clean now, it looks pretty and sparkling and full of draping, flowing curtains just like their room at the Mall. Something is different now when _she_ says home.

She means it.

...

Cracks start to appear.

For some it had started on the boat, many days and weeks cooped up in close quarters, no where to go, no escape, no release. There had been no hiding away from the truths they had tried to keep bottled up.

Perhaps, if they had been in the Mall, those secrets would've stayed that way but there is something about cabin fever that loosens the tongue. Ebony is the one who comes off the worst. _She_ understands though, of all people, what it is like to feel the grip of irrational love. To take extreme measures to keep someone for yourself.

 _She_ goes to her once, after Slade rides off one day on a motorbike and vows never to come back. _You think we're alike?_ Ebony hisses and it is impossible to miss the sparkle of emotion in her eyes, made more so by the beautiful rhinestones worn in her makeup like tears. _I'll never be like you. You're pathetic._

It's comforting to think that, after everything they have been through together, that they will never really be friends.

...

When Brady was born, _he_ gave her his lucky whistle.

When Dal died, _she_ gave it back.

...

He finds her, quite by accident, round the back of the building, with a coffee. It's where she comes to hide, she admits with a smile and a slight flush on her pale skin. He doesn't know what she is hiding from and he doesn't ask. He takes the coffee gratefully when she offers it to him, grimaces when she says he looks like death.

He's not sleeping much, he admits, he's tired. But there's more than that, there's this thing with Ellie or, rather, there isn't anything with Ellie anymore.

 _Oh Jack_ , and her sadness is genuine, he realises. She thought he and Ellie were going to make it last. _I'm sorry_.

There is hesitation before the hug and then warmth, her hair on his cheek and her perfume in his breath. He doesn't know what to, so one hand sticks out awkwardly, trying not to scald her with hot coffee and the other falls lamely by his side.

The hide out together.

...

She had hugged him _before_ and he still remembers it.

That welcome-back-embrace - that huge grin on her face, the feeling of her pressed against him; that sudden, breathless _Jack!_ as she had caught hold of him. He had hugged back: too surprised to be awkward, too happy to be embarrassed. It had only been afterwards, when she had released him and squeezed his arm, when she had dashed off to find the others that he had felt the familiar creep of blushes over his cheeks.

Up until that point, she had always just been _Trudy_. Just Trudy. The girl who made him remember how much he missed his best friend, the girl who frightened him with her hysterics and her child, _just_ a girl, just another girl who lived in the mall like Amber or Sal.

But something had stirred inside him back then. The same something that had flickered on the boat and _aches_ now when he hears her say _sweetheart._

He has thought about it since and thinks about it now, in the dark, when he can't sleep: the feeling of his hands pressed against her shoulder blades, his lips close to her neck, the curve of her top over her cleavage, the promise of pale, untouched skin under her clothes.

There's no way to sleep when his thoughts are like that.

 _..._

 _Slut_. Looney, idiot, stupid, weak. Supreme Fruitcake.

She knows all of the names they have called her behind her back.

 _Murderer_.

But she tries not to think about them, she tries to focus on the things they call her now, to her face: best-friend, brave, strong. _Mama_. She has been weak before, she has done a lot of things not to be proud of. And they remember everything bad. Hurt, distrust, betrayal are looks she has become used to in their eyes, even if it's in the past now, even if she has been forgiven.

No one remembers that day on the beach when she sacrificed her own freedom for Lex's; no one understands how her betrayal of the Tribe was to protect her daughter.

She doesn't speak of the many months she spent patiently listening to the victims of The Guardian. How she worked her way through riddled, broken minds with such calm resolve, such brave determination that Amber had been astonished to silence around it. The Gaians had wanted her to stay. Bray had looked on her fondly. Pride had told her how strong she was.

Except:

She does speak of it once, when he asks, one evening when neither of them can sleep.

When he asks, she tells: this has become their norm.

There seems little point in holding her tongue any longer, little point in keeping those lost months to herself. He could never understand how weak she feels when she talks about letting The Guardian into her mind, how weak and shaky she still feels to say his name, how scared she is that he is still there, somewhere, deep inside of her, biding his time.

She had seen herself in those children rescued during the rebellion. In every lost look and empty smile she had seen the little girl who was foolish enough to let The Chosen into her head. That was how she had found the patience. She had wanted so badly for someone to save _her_ , for someone to understand her loneliness and depression and the dark thoughts in her head that say she'll never be right, never be good enough, she isn't strong.

Trudy doesn't expect the creak in her voice as she whispers her way through the story nor the stammer nor the tears, burning at the back of her throat at first, blazing a flush across her cheeks and then glittering in her eyes. She is thankful that it is dark, that her hands are clenched together under the table so he cannot see her trembling. She excuses herself with the offer of hot chocolate, the tears taking her whilst she searches in the cupboards for powdered milk and those mini-marshmallows she kept hidden from the children.

She doesn't want him to call her those things. She doesn't want him to think them. She doesn't want him to even remember that time he had hissed the word _murderer_ when he thought she couldn't hear him.

She wants him to forget that her. She wants him to think of her as good and pure and strong.

She wants him to think of her as good-enough. Good-enough for someone like him.

...

It becomes a habit, this insomnia, an addiction.

It becomes so that she doesn't dare try to sleep in case she misses his nightly trawl to the kitchen for water or sandwiches or coffee. He allows her to sit with him and sometimes they say nothing and sometimes she talks too much of daily life and chores and looking after the children and things that he has no interest in, sometimes she talks so much that he hushes her.

 _..._

 _He wanted to be a dad_. She has said many things to him over the years and though most of her apologies have failed to lighten his heart this thing somehow does. _He would've been good at it ... he was good with Brady._

It is strange to think of Dal as wanting to be a father, about growing up and getting married and living a life. Of thinking of him as a grown up. There is something dull and locked away in her eyes, even as she says it, something he recognises.

 _Even when I was a Mom and running away from it_ , _he knew_. Her voice is faraway. Maybe so faraway that she is back there, years ago, back with Troy and Susannah. _He convinced me to come back_.

Guilt.

He knows suddenly then how grateful she is to his best friend - still his best friend and only true friend even after all of these years - he suddenly understands that she had loved Dal too, that she still does, despite everything.

...

When the electric comes on in this new place, there isn't the same awe for the Mallrats as there was the first time round.

There is relief and hope and the feeling that maybe things might start to get good again, that they might start to get back on top.

There isn't the feeling of power that he had first wished for, the hero-worship that he had been seeking when he first embarked on this journey to change things. But there is _something_ : there is awe shining in her eyes as she comes to him later and catches him one of those rare hugs that he has been loosing sleep over.

 _You're amazing_ , she breathes on to his cheek, her lips meaning to be against them too.

But he moves.

...

He tastes like his workshop: metallic and warm with the hint of coffee in the aftertaste. His kisses are like his workshop too: cluttered and chaotic but, it feels like there is something else in there too, purpose. Genius.

...

She tastes like the outside: earthy and clear like the first really cold, sunny day of the year. And she kisses like she's afraid, with her hands on his neck or in his hair, like he might go away again, like he doesn't really mean it when he says that no, it's not him - it is she who is _amazing_.

 _..._

 _He would've loved this. What you've done here_. His words aren't an acceptance of her apologies, much like her recent references to Dal don't ask for his forgiveness. But somehow ... somehow they mend things slowly, little by little, story by story, secret by secret.

The garden is in full bloom. Not a farm or a small holding or anything more than just big enough to give them a few fresh meals a week, but to walk between the tall rows of corn and the bursts of yellow on the courgette plants - to see the things she has created with her own hands and time and hard work fills him awe.

And Brady too, the most magical thing she has ever created, pulling the carrots from the ground and chomping on them, still covered in dirt. Brady dancing with the butterflies and the bumblebees and learning all the plant names they can find in the few books they have. Brady amongst the leaves like an explorer - bare feet and sun hat - seeking out wiggly worms and bits of stone and tomatoes that shine like jewels in her little hands.

He builds them a ladybird house and he tells her all about how good for the garden they are, how they are predators, like sharks or crocodiles, how they bravely protect their vegetable patch like soldiers.

It doesn't take too long before she comes bounding up to him, wild and free and full of delight. _Jack - Jack - Jack_ , Brady says, holding out her forefinger gingerly, the other hand on her hip: _I found a shark_.

He wonders then, could he want the same thing Dal had - could he be any good at it too?

And that's the thing about their garden, this new life; hope: sharks can be small and red with spots; he can fall in love again, slowly and with _her_ ; and she can realise that the boy who had been against her from the beginning was really the one who was meant for her all along.


End file.
